Pirate fans toss around teams we’d like to see the Pirates emulate pretty regularly. The Rays probably come up the most right now, but at various other times there’s been the A’s, the Indians, the Marlins, the Twins, the Reds, the Brewers, the Giants, the Rangers, the Rockies, the Diamondbacks, and just about every other team that’s won anything even remotely significant since 2007 except for the Red Sox, Yankees, or Phillies. One team no one really wants to see the Pirates compared to is the Royals, because they’re maybe the one franchise in baseball as moribund as the Pirates.
Except that there’s this: the Royals minor league system is loaded. After the Zack Greinke trade, they’ve got one of the best farm systems of the last decade. Dayton Moore’s taken a ton of deserved flack for his terrible big league level moves (signing guys like Jason Kendall and Rick Ankiel and Jeff Francoeur and Miguel Olivo while dropping guys like John Buck and, I mean, I could go on but I think pretty much everyone knows what I’m talking about), but he’s drafted incredibly well since taking over from Allard Baird in mid-2006 (right after that year’s draft, if my dates are correct).
Of course, drafting well doesn’t guarantee success. If you clicked that FanGraphs link above, you can see that the last team to accumulate this much talent was the Diamondbacks of the middle part of the decade. They seemed primed for a run at the top of the NL West when they won the division and went to the NLCS in 2007, but they’s sinced bottomed out, fired their GM, and threatened to trade their reasonably-paid young star. I don’t think anyone would see it as a stretch if the Royals ended up in a similar position (sorry, Royals fans; I’m rooting for better than that for you).
Then again, the Bucs aren’t exactly a 1:1 comparison with the Royals talent-wise. The Pirates’ farm system has been rising in the Baseball America rankings the last few seasons and with Jameson Taillon and Stetson Allie entering the system while Tony Sanchez continues to exceed draft day expectations and a few other young pitchers progressing nicely, I think that trend will continue. The Pirates don’t have anything like the collection of talent the Royals have in the minors, though. If you count the other under-25 former prospects that have already made big league rosters (the Pirates have McCutchen, Tabata, and Alvarez while the Royals don’t really have anyone that fits that bill since Billy Butler will be 25 next year) that helps the Pirates a bit, but then the service clock is also ticking away on those guys.
It’s also true that Huntington and Moore’s approaches as GMs haven’t been identical. Huntington inherited Andrew McCutchen and has sort of built around him; his first two first round picks were quick-moving college players and he’s targeted young players or prospects who’ve worn out their welcome with other teams in almost all of his trades with varying levels of success. Moore’s big draft picks have been almost exclusively high school kids while he’s filled out his big league roster with veterans in hopes of finding some sort of magical combination of low OBP players that contends for the playoffs while his prospects marinate.
Still, I think looking at the Royals can help inform our view of the Pirates. Rebuilding in the wake of a disastrous GM isn’t just a slow process in Pittsburgh. It’s also clear that jacking up the payroll just for the sake of jacking up the payroll in the middle of a rebuilding process doesn’t necessarily give better results (except in 2008, when their payroll was $58 million, the Royals have had payrolls between $67 and $74 million in the Moore era but haven’t won more than 75 games or finished higher than fourth in the AL Central). I’m also interested to see how the two different philosophies play out. If Huntington manages to build a contender around McCutchen, Alvarez, Tabata, and Walker, he might be able to do it a year or two quicker than it takes Moore’s posse to mature, but there’s a bit of an age gap in the Pirates’ system right now between the very good young players in Pittsburgh and the team’s best prospects (save Tony Sanchez). That might mean the Pirates follow a similar path to the Brewers; a narrow window of contention before deciding to either rebuild or go for broke. It also means that if anything screws up the timing (injuries, slower than expected development from a guy like Taillon, Pedro Alvarez not improving on his rookie year, etc. etc. etc.) the Pirates could miss their window entirely and not be a contender until, say, 2016. Of course, that’s not any more or less risky than banking on a bevy of prospects all fulfilling their potential (again, ask the Diamondbacks) and trusting a guy that keeps giving Jason Kendall a job to know how to fill in the blanks; it’s just a different strategy.
The last thing that I find interesting is that Moore seems to have a little more job security than Huntington. That’s probably at least partially because Moore doesn’t have Frank Coonelly pulling strings above him and because David Glass is probably 10 times more evil and apathetic about his team’s success than Pirate fans like to think Bob Nutting is (which would make him at least 100x worse than Nutting really is), but it’s probably also at least partially because he didn’t ever lose 105 games in a season. And what has Huntington done this offseason? Sign a bunch of middling veterans in the hopes that they can improve the big league club and maybe bring something in a trade. I think he’s done much better than Moore usually does with his targets this off-season (I’d much rather have Lyle Overbay than Jeff Francoeur, for example), but as I’ve said before, the guys Huntington’s signed aren’t nearly as important to the team’s success in 2011 as the players already on the roster.
In the end, I think the reason the Royals are interesting is this: there are plenty of teams in similar sized markets with similar financial situations to the Pirates, but few of them were in as bad shape as the Pirates were when Neal Huntington took over. The Royals qualify, though, and that means it’s worth watching how they’re trying to solve their problems.
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